Sonatype Blog: Latest Posts

What is Mercury?

– Decouple major Maven components, making them available as stand-alone building blocks rather then having Maven as as one big monolith, not usable outside of its environment.
– **Artifact** – clearly separate an Artifact from its metadata.
– **Repository** – convert a repository into active component. It used to give back just pathOf(), now it accepts GAV collections and gives back either metadata or full blown Artifacts.
– **Transport** – an API in development.
– **DependencyTreeBuilder** main API for dependency graph creation and conflict resolution.
– Decouple container, so that these components are just plain pojos.
– Introduce **Jetty**-based HTTP/HTTPS and WebDAV transactional transport layer.
– Asynchronous downloads and uploads. One of the few successful usages of Java NIO in OSS.
– Transactional operations – all-or-nothing for file sets.
– Move integrity control into transport layer, upper level components should not care about these details.
– Abstract out metadata cache, provide at least one implementation there.
– Integrate these changes back to Maven 3.x to make it even better platform than it is right now (if it is possible to be better )

Currently Mercury can already be used for accessing repositories, and conflict resolution is under testing.